Episode 580: Virtual E3

Publishers are doing their virtual E3 announcements, such as Ubisoft Forward and ID@Xbox’s Indie Showcase. There’s other wild news going on, and some not even in the official news items below.

Said news items include:

  • Ubisoft executives quit over misconduct allegations
  • Microsoft has stopped making the Xbox One X
  • Blasphemous gets free Stir of Dawn DLC on August 4

Let us know what you think.

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Sony’s Software Development Beta ProjectsSony’s Software Development Beta Projects

It seems we’ve seen a lot of great concepts from Sony for their PlayStation 3 product line but very little has managed to hit the software virtual shelves. We’ve heard of Sony’s Afrika for the PS3 back at E3 in 2006 and we’re looking at it for 2008’s holiday lineup.

We’ve heard about Sony Home for years as well, but that’s now in some type of beta. It was supposed to be an open beta but that didn’t seem to work out and now it’s closed beta only. Recently they pushed out a firmware update that bricked PlayStation 3 consoles or at least screwed up many of them in varying levels.

Are they just really bad at software development and road map predictions? As a hardware development company they’ve put out some hardcore products, stone cold stable in terms of design and efficiency from the Walk Man to the PS3. Their products are practical in design, for the most part, fairly pretty, stable and function as designed. Yet they come up short on software time and time again.

One of the contributors at 2old2play had some things to say about Sony’s development efforts:

“Having worked at Sony as a Creative Designer two years ago, it doesn’t surprise me that they have still yet to release Home. While there, I was working on their Station Launcher application which was supposed to be released in late 2006. However, the Launcher app is still only in Beta to this day.” (2old2play.com)

In many ways their the anti-Microsoft in their approach and commitments. While Microsoft ships hardware that has what must be a 60% failure rate Sony ships hardware which works fairly well. On the flip side, Microsoft publishes a large quantity of software for all their products and has done very well in the business. Nobody can say it’s 100% perfect but it tends to get better with age or, at least, grow on you.

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Episode 265: See You After E3Episode 265: See You After E3

This episode is a little late due to the holiday, but at least it’ll give everyone something to listen to when there’s no episode next week due to Jonah Falcon and Paul S. Nowak heading to E3.

In the meantime, the gang covers the following news:

  • THQ: “Linear is not a dirty word for an FPS”
  • Pachter decries on-disc DLC as “just plain greed”
  • Crysis 2 returns to Steam
  • The Old Republic still has one of the biggest dev teams in industry

Along with the usual Reader Feedback, the crew this time asks the readers to ask some questions, instead of the other way around. Let us know what you want to know.

Episode 351: Explicit LyricsEpisode 351: Explicit Lyrics

This week’s episode is shockingly adult, so the warning about explicit lyrics is up. Aside from the dirtiness, the episode features the following news:

  • Apple refuses to allow an educational app on female stimulation
  • Zenimax announces lawsuit against Oculus
  • Sony may be working on newer PS4, PS3 models
  • PS4 game pre-loading will begin with Destiny
  • External storage coming in Xbox One system update in June
  • Blizzard is suing Starcraft 2 hackers for profiting off mods

This plus Listener Feedback and the Question of the Week, “What is your favorite party game?”